Trump-- An Impeachable Offense Nearly Every Single Day!

Over the weekend, Adam Schiff, noted that "The real risk of the Trump administration’s blanket stonewalling of Congress is that it’s fundamentally altered the balance of power that our framers intended. If a president can thwart congressional oversight that means any future president can be as corrupt as they choose and there’s no recourse."

Before dawn yesterday, the Washington Post published a piece by Seung Min Kim and Rachel Bade: Trump’s defiance of oversight challenges Congress’s ability to rein in executive branch. Constitutional crisis anyone? "Lawmakers, including Schiff, have discussed the possibility of trying to fine, censure or withhold money from obstinate Trump officials-- but even those possibilities, they warn, may do nothing... For the first time since Democrats took control of the House last year," Kim and Bade reported, "Trump’s effort to stonewall congressional efforts at oversight have begun to show some cracks. On Thursday, a former State Department official set off a firestorm when he defied the White House’s no-cooperation strategy and provided Congress with text messages detailing the administration’s effort to leverage a meeting with Trump to pressure his Ukrainian counterpart to launch investigations into the U.S. president’s political rivals. And House Democrats are expected to interview other critical witnesses as they try to build a case for impeaching Trump over his alleged willingness to seek the help of a foreign leader for his own political gain. But these rare triumphs are seen as fleeting even by Democrats and serve as a stark reminder of how much the administration has run roughshod over Congress, prompting concerns among constitutional experts and lawmakers that Trump’s hostile stance toward congressional oversight is undermining the separation of powers in a way that could have long-term implications for democracy."

“He is shaking the foundations of the republic,” said Kerry Kircher, who was House counsel for the Republican majority between 2011 and 2016. “He is poking his fingers into all of the places where we have norms and traditions and things that both parties have respected for years, and he has blown all of those out the window.”

...For the 276 days that Trump has faced an adversarial House Democratic majority, his administration has worked systematically to resist congressional investigations and further diminish Capitol Hill’s power to keep the executive branch in check.

Administration officials have ignored subpoenas, blocked witnesses from testifying and even defied the legislative power of the purse stipulated in the Constitution.

...[E]xperts say Trump’s defiance stands apart because of his unwillingness to engage in any oversight. Ever since he vowed last spring to ignore “all the subpoenas,” his subordinates have refused to allow even a single Trump official to cooperate, creating what some experts call a constitutional crisis that Democrats have struggled to respond to and counter.

“It’s just gotten steadily worse with each president being more and more resistant to congressional oversight,” said former Republican congressman Tom Davis of Virginia, who chaired the House Oversight Committee from 2003 to 2007. “The tendency over the last 40 years has been, the president’s party tends to under-investigate and the opposition party tends to over-investigate.”

Davis added: “It didn’t start with Trump; he’s certainly taken it to the next level.”

This year alone, the Trump administration has worked to methodically delay and block about two dozen probes into his conduct as president, his personal finances and the policies of his administration. He has stonewalled on everything from security clearances given to his family to his tax returns. He has ignored compulsory measures on his controversial family separation policy at the border and refused to let his staff testify about what they told former special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election.

You and I may have some voyeuristic tendencies in our desire to see Trump's taxes. Congress has entirely different reasons. Yesterday, a federal judge in New York dismissed Trump's objections and ruled that his longtime accounting firm must turn over eight years of tax returns as part of a criminal probe of his business dealings led by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance. Judge Victor Marrero said he could not endorse such a "categorical and limitless assertion of presidential immunity from judicial process... [which] would constitute an overreach of executive power."

Marrero: "Shunning the concept of the inviolability of the person of the King of England and the bounds of the monarch's protective screen covering the Crown's actions from legal scrutiny, the Founders disclaimed any notion that the Constitution generally conferred similarly all-encompassing immunity upon the President." Nonetheless, just a few minutes later, a federal appeals court granted Trump a temporary stay, meaning he won't have to turnover his tax filings pending a review by a three-judge panel of the appeals court.

Krugman's first choice in his Monday morning tweet about why Trump betrayed the Kurds is why series Members of Congress-- albeit, of course, not Republicans (at least not publicly)-- have been hammering away in an attempt to get Trump's tax returns. It's not about anyone being a yenta; it's about someone else being a serial crime wave.